Consumers aren’t going to see a barley-flavored brew anytime soon in their local pub or grocery store, but the findings are an important first step toward a potential new market for beer connoisseurs, said OSU barley breeder Pat Hayes.

We started this project with a question: Are there novel flavors in barley that carry through malting and brewing and into beer? This is a revolutionary idea in the brewing world. We found that the answer is yes, Hayes said. These positive beer flavor attributes provide new opportunities for brewers and expand horizons for consumers.

In its malted form, barley is the principal source of fermentable sugars for most beers. But barley’s flavor contributions to beer are usually ascribed to the malting process rather than the grain itself.

Barley World, Hayes’ research group at OSU, with financial support from the beer industry, began with two barley varieties thought to have positive flavor attributes in beer: Golden Promise, developed and released in Great Britain, and OSU’s own barley variety, Full Pint. They then crossbred the two. That resulted in several hundred breeding lines of genetic seed stock. Researchers grew the offspring in test plots in Corvallis, Lebanon and Madras.

But there was a logistical challenge in preparing that barley for brewing and sensory testing. OSU’s progeny of Golden Promise and Full Pint each yielded only about 200 grams of malt — not enough for a reasonable sample to produce large quantities of beer for a standard sensory panel.

Bob Monsour, brewing research scientist at Rahr Malting Company in Minnesota, bottles beer brewed from barley grown by OSU breeders. Photo courtesy of Dustin Herb, Oregon State University

That’s when OSU teamed with Minnesota-based Rahr Malting Company and New Glarus Brewing in Wisconsin. The companies had developed a brewing system that could produce a single bottle of beer from each unique malt. Dustin Herb, a graduate student in OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences, spent almost a year at Rahr participating in the micro-malting, nano-brewing and sensory processes.

Out of that initial partnership, about 150 beers were prepared for sensory testing. Each panelist tasted the beers once and then rated them on a scale in their amount of difference compared to an industry standard control beer.

The panelists found that beer brewed with Golden Promise scored significantly higher in fruity, floral and grassy flavors. Beer with Full Pint was significantly higher in malty, toffee and toasted flavors.

The progeny are showing all possible combinations of those traits. And, since researchers had been conducting DNA fingerprinting on these progeny, they can now assign certain regions of the barley genome as being responsible for these flavors. The study also found that there were some differences based on where the barley was grown, but the genetic effect was larger than the environment.

OSU barley breeder Patrick Hayes holds a stalk of barley in a test plot at Hyslop Field Lab near Corvallis. Photo courtesy of Pat Hayes, Oregon State University

Based on the results of more Golden Promise-Full Pint progeny, finer structure genetic mapping of barley flavor genes is underway with Rahr. Researchers are also working with Deschutes Brewery in Bend to produce more representative beers from three of the selected progeny. OSU is producing 100 pounds of malt of each variety as well as a control sample called Copeland.​All three have unique flavor attributes and are relatively easy to grow. They have outstanding malt profiles. Deschutes is prepared to brew the same beer twice for each of those three and compare that to the control. Those beers are then destined to be sent to other brewers who will conduct their own sensory panels.

In addition to Herb, OSU Barley Project members Tanya Filichkin, Scott Fisk and Laura Helgerson contributed to the research. Collaborators included scientists in England, Canada, Scotland, Spain and the U.S.